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RPM Technique

I once used a very weird technique with my team to get things done in a short duration in a project that was very far away from being on schedule…

For a while I’ve been asking my team for their progress, following up heavily and on daily basis, staying late with them in the office and sometimes staying till the next morning (online from home), trying to dig deeper by developing and testing with them…. And still we were very late in achieving any of our internal milestones…

By time, I was empathizing them and I was trying my best to reduce the effect of the pressure under which they were put for a long time. We started a weekly game competition with some funny yet work-related rules, amongst which was “each member in a sub-team should finish his work before the day of the competition”… it went fine for about 3 weeks, then the situation became worse… and we all stopped participating in the competition…RMPTechnique

I then tried another technique… I started buying them either lunch or dinner in the days we stayed late at the office… Then by time, the lunch invitation became a habit… The team asked me to stop buying them lunch… and at this time, the idea came to me!! Light bulb “Well I’ll buy you lunch as long as you didn’t finish your work! And this is punishment not a reward!”… They felt very guilty and they were resisting the daily free meals… they didn’t want me to punish myself this way… and I stuck more and more on applying this technique… I was punishing myself so that my team gets motivated!

Finally we delivered a very successful project, the team was very happy… and I was totally broken!!

And this is what I call the Reverse Punishment Motivation (RPM) Technique!

When I thought about writing this post, I remembered a movie I saw a while ago… I am not sure whether it influenced me unconsciously or not… A little boy in an orphanage was used to lying… One day the headmaster called him… then grabbed a small stick… the boy was frightened to death because he knew he would be punished and beaten with this stick… And guess what? Instead of beating the little boy, the headmaster handed over the stick to him, and asked him (the boy) to beat him (the headmaster)… from this day, whenever the boy lied, the headmaster was to be beaten… by time, the little boy started to understand that his lies hurt others not him… and he stopped lying!

I am not sure how this relates to what I did, I just remembered it and thought of some unclear connection in my mind!

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Comments

Colourless_Turtle said…
enjoyed the post :)) (Y)
July 15, 2011 at 2:10 AM
Ayat Elshami said…
Except that you have to know that your team trusts you so much to do this... For if the case was that the delay was a PM's mistake, the team may see that the least the PM can do to make up for their staying late is to bring them lunch. I guess this can't be applied except in an environment where team members have intense feelings for their PM ;)

PS. Ya 7'sara.. I wasn't documenting that project ;)
July 18, 2011 at 9:05 AM
Mena M. Eissa said…
Don't worry, there are lots of projects in the bag :D who knows! :)
July 19, 2011 at 10:24 PM
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